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Before we leave developer Rod Lockwood’s Belle Isle dream to the file of unfulfilled ideas, I want to highlight what struck me as the most fantastical aspect of his utopian vision.

It wasn’t the multibillion-dollar figures he was throwing around, or the absurdly optimistic predictions of new economic spinoffs. What struck me was the almost magical belief Lockwood and his partners have in the power of tax cuts and small government to render human society perfectible.

Maybe they wouldn’t put it that way. But it’s all there in the pages of Lockwood’s slim fantasy novel. His Commonwealth of Belle Isle would have no inflation, no crime, no public corruption. No welfare payments, either, because self-reliant “freedom advocates” don’t need and won’t ask for ’em. The currency remains strong, and civic virtue runs high.

Meanwhile, the thousands of service workers needed to make Lockwood’s fantasy island work would all live uncomplainingly in nearby worker housing on the Detroit mainland -- the 21st-Century version of “downstairs” to the wealthy "Downton Abbey" denizens “upstairs” on the island itself.

The ideal society on the Commonwealth attracts so much money from around the globe that the city of Detroit blossoms with huge increases in development and job creation.

All this happens because government spending on the Commonwealth shrinks by constitutional fiat to under 10% of gross domestic product from around 40% in the U.S. today. Government regulations shrink to almost nothing to attract capital – sort of a Cayman Islands of the Midwest.

Believers in this Ayn Rand-type vision know in their bones that low taxes and small government produce such a frictionless society.

The problem, of course, is that this vision doesn’t account for any of those messy human qualities that real governments and real citizens contend with daily.

Just to cite one data point: Total government spending as a percentage of GDP remained at or below 10% in the United States for much of our history, until the New Deal programs emerged in the 1930s. And all during the decades prior to that, America still suffered depressions and public corruption and crime and civil unrest and racism and a full assortment of other ills.

There’s nothing magical about low taxes and small government. They may in fact represent good public policy. But they don’t create deus ex machina economic growth. And they certainly don’t eliminate jealousy or greed or dishonesty or the other traits we humans are prone to.